This long-overdue version of the best book ever written about the British in India - and that includes Paul Scott's Raj Quartet - is a good example of the Cinderella status that audio books have to put up with in the publishing world. It won the Booker in 1973 and is the second of Farrell's brilliant Empire Trilogy, which started with Troubles and ended with The Singapore Grip, neither of which is available in audio.

Why on earth not? Farrell is the funniest novelist in English since Evelyn Waugh, with the same eye for the absurd as Tom Sharpe. This is the fictitious account, hilarious and horrifying by turns, of a besieged British garrison which held out for four months in the summer of 1857, the year of the Great Indian Mutiny, against a horde of native Sepoys. Despite the omens, the young British cavalry officers continue to indulge their taste for galloping into the nearest memsahib's drawing room, jumping over the sofas and then filling their sola topis with champagne instead of water to quench their horses' thirst. It is left to the Governor of Krishnapur, a sensitive, cultured man with a collection of treasures in his residence, to prepare for the siege. By the end of it cholera, starvation and the Sepoys have done for most of the inhabitants, who are reduced to eating beetles and, in the absence of powder and shot, loading their cannons with monogrammed silver cutlery and false teeth. The final retreat of the British, still doggedly stiff-upper-lipped, through the pantries, laundries, music rooms and ballroom of the residency, using chandeliers and violins as weapons, is a comic delight. And so is the usually serious Tim Pigott-Smith, whose repertoire of characters, from petulant maharajas to pink-faced subalterns - "I say, may we come in, we've come to relieve you" - is dazzling.

Willy Chandran leaves India to study in London, where he becomes part of the post-war immigration bohemian set. Marcus the West Indian has two ambitions: to have a white grandchild (he's dedicated to inter-racial sex) and to open an account at Coutts. Richard, a middle-class adventurer from Oxford in pursuit of a foreign heiress, adopts Marxism, a military haircut and a clean white shirt to further his cause. Why, Willy asks Serafina from Colombia, did she marry a pederast? Because if you're rich and white and speak only classical Spanish it's hard to find anyone else, she says. If Naipaul's reputation for serious social commentary has hitherto daunted you, try this.

The silliest woman can marry a clever man but it takes a very clever woman to manage a fool, says the fascinating Mrs Hawksby, a woman with considerable experience in the ways of the world and other people's husbands. Every hill station in the Raj had a Mrs Hawksby, along with a swatch of other colourful characters, all of whom feature in these stories. No one spins a yarn better than the young Kipling. And no one tells them better than the much parodied Martin Jarvis, who for once cannot be faulted. His tone reminds me of Saki's Clovis and so do many of these wry, satirical tales, though Kipling isn't as snooty.

An unabridged epic is such a rare thing that I unwisely began this before digesting the blurb. It's based on the Orpheus myth, with superstar rock musicians Ormus and Vina from Bombay as the mythical lovers. To judge from his knowledge of the American music scene (the plot moves from India to America), Rushdie has spent as much time with US rock musicians as Jilly Cooper spent with polo players and violinists to write her books. Frankly the result isn't that different.

Listening to a beautiful voice, says the narrator, who is also in love with Vina, is the last of the five most important things in life. I won't bother you with the others, they're too corny. When she isn't blasting away on the stage of some superbowl stadium to thousands of adoring fans, Vina will burst into that aria from Gluck's opera that gave Kathleen Ferrier her big break. Even in fiction this sort of crossover is hard to swallow. The real mystery is why, of all the books they could have chosen not to abridge, they picked this one.